Oil "speculation" is not the culprit. The fact is if things keep going the way they're going right now, future oil supplies will not meet demand and we'll face shortages that will make us wish we could go back to $120 a barrel. Oil traders know this so they're stocking up. It's called investment. When you predict something will be valuable in the future you buy it now while it's cheap so you can sell it after demand has driven up the price. "Speculation" is really insurance, a guarantee that when oil production falls short, oil stockpiles will make up the difference in supply and demand.
The environmentalist dogma that domestic oil production must cease in order to preserve nature has moved the oil markets to buy oil instead of selling it. Why? Because we won't stop using oil just because we've stopped producing it, we'll import it instead, and when a good portion of those imports are produced by OPEC we will be futilely unable to adapt to their unpredictable production rates. Oil prices will remain artificially high in order to prevent shortages from bringing the United States to a grinding halt. In that situation, oil trading regulation would be murderous. Without the ability to buy up oil the "speculators" will have nothing to sell us when OPEC decides not to sell us what we need.
The only true solution is to make OPEC unable to hurt us, and we do that by increasing domestic oil production. We increase production by drilling in places we haven't explored yet, and for now there's a congressional moratorium on that sort of exploration. Were that moratorium lifted, domestic oil production would not increase for at least five years, but the market doesn't care about that. "Speculators" would immediately start selling their oil hoping to make a profit while the price is still high, predicting that future oil production would make their stockpiles dirt cheap. Prices would fall long before the new oil fields produced anything. Really, it's the Democrats who have voted against lowering oil prices. They could lift the moratorium and oil prices would decrease by half in a matter of days as oil companies announced their plans to explore new oil fields.
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